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Tuesday, April 14, 2015

The Abbey Road Reverb Trick

Here's a cool mixing trick from my 101 Mixing Tricks coaching program. Abbey Road Studios in London has long been noted for the great sounding reverb on the recordings done there. A big reason for that is the way they treat the signal going into the plates and chambers.

The Abbey Road Reverb Trick will show you how to get that same sound, plus a few enhancements to make sure that your reverb glues all of your mix elements together without it being obvious.

There's a lot more killer tricks where this came from covering punchy drums and percussion sounds, great lead and background vocals, killer instruments, and cool balance, panning, EQ, compression and automation tricks. Check it out at 101MixTricks.com.

4 comments:

Hi BobbyThanks for a great video. I use reverb live alot and the mixers dont have low pass and high pass filters for SEND. They usually only have shelving EQs so how much do you recommend that I take out to achieve something similar to the 18db/oct filters. Thanks.

You're not going to get the same effect as an 18dB/oct filter, since the Q of most shelving filters are much gentler than that so the effect won't be the same. I'd cut 9 to 12dB on the LF and HF EQ, which should get you in the ballpark.

Thanks for the wonderful input. I've read your other blogs and you said you prefer 12db/oct which prob translate to about 6-9db cut on the shelves ? Do you prefer 1/4 note or 1/8 predelay for vocal? And how long should I aim the reverb time for lead vocal? I just found your book on Amazon and looking forward to a good read!

The predelay depends upon the song. Sometimes all you need is 20ms to separate it from the the vocal. That said, a lot of classic records from the 60s -80s used tape delay and that was naturally pretty long - between 120 and 175ms depending upon the machine.